Alaska Science Forum: Digging up Augustine's top-heavy legacyAugustine Volcano sits alone, a 4,000-foot pyramid on its own island in Cook Inlet. Like many volcanoes, it has a tendency to become top heavy. When gravity acts on Augustine's oversteepened dome, rockslides spill into the ocean. A scientist recently found new evidence for an Augustine-generated tsunami from a time when Egyptian pharaohs built their own pyramids. Zebulon Maharrey's record of a tsunami deposit from...

NLC Power Rankings: Winning not mandatoryDavid Anderson reminded me this past weekend that winning isn’t mandatory during the regular season of high school athletics in Alaska. The Kodiak boys’ basketball coach is right. Look no further than his 2011 team that went 1-9 during the Northern Lights Conference regular season and somehow turned things around and earned a place at state by finishing second in the conference tournament. I didn’t have time to sk...

The day the President caught a dolly at the BuskinIn the late afternoon of August 7, 1944, in the middle of World War II, if you had been standing on Brooklyn Avenue, which ran about where the back of Sutliifs Hardware is now, you could have waved to President Franklin Roosevelt as he drove by in a station wagon. It was Roosevelt’s first visit to an Alaskan town, and the only visit by a sitting president to Kodiak. A few weeks earlier, Roosevelt had boarded the h...

Public Safety Blotter: Feb. 3Jan. 5 Around 12:19 a.m., police conducted two bar checks downtown. At 8:35 a.m., police asked a person to leave the Marine Way area. They did so. At 9:05 a.m., police warned a speeding driver on Mission Road. At 9:24 a.m., a caller reported a traffic offense on Shelikof Street. The vehicle was gone when police arrived. At 9:26 a.m., police gave a driving advisement to a driver on Mill Bay Road. At 10:54 a.m., pol...

Around Kodiak: Feb. 3Kodiak Fish & Game Advisory Committee meeting There will be a meeting of the Kodiak Fish & Game Advisory Committee at 1 p.m. Wednesday Feb. 4 at the new Fish & Game building. The department will give a report on the 2014 fishery and predictions for the 2015 commercial salmon fishery. The committee will tackle the vacant committee seat and replacement of the Large Boat Crab seat holder for non-attendence of meeting...

Assembly gets code revision, budget updatesThe Kodiak Island Borough Assembly has agreed to nix the current process to update three sections of borough code dealing with land use. “I think we need to send a clear message to the public that this process is being killed, it’s done,” assembly member Frank Peterson said at Thursday’s work session. “All of the hard work that planning and zoning has done isn’t going to go away,” Peterson said. “It’s still going ...

Official says borough inspectors face death threats“There are people out there saying things like, ‘Shoot them in the face. Shoot them, just kill them, click, click, boom, boom.’” Speaking at the Kodiak Island Borough Assembly work session on Thursday, borough assessor Bill Roberts described the intimidating atmosphere he and his staff face when carrying out their mandated duties. Social media posts in recent months have included threats against borough staff if t...

Outdoor Kodiak: We live in rain countryKodiak is wet. That isn’t news to anyone who has lived here even a little while, but the details might surprise even the crusty among us. Before writing this week’s column I went online to dig through the weather statistics for 2014, and I learned a few things that surprised even me. Kodiak’s average annual precipitation is 77 inches. If 2014 seemed especially wet, you’re right. Last year from January 1 through De...

Teeing Off: Seahawks lost Super Bowl long before final callOne yard. Three feet. Thirty-six inches. One-and-a-half Gizmos. That’s the distance Seattle came from repeating as Super Bowl champions. While all the 12s in the world are blaming Seattle coach Pete Carroll and offensive coordinator Darrell Bevel for the Seahawks’ 28-24 debacle of a loss to New England in Super Bowl XLIX, I’m not putting the crushing defeat solely on those two. To all the 12s, I am partly to blame...

Alumni update: Anthony grabs NCAA provisional timeDylan Anthony posted his first provisional NCAA II indoor track and field qualifying time of his senior season over the weekend at the University of Washington Invite. The University of Alaska senior finished ninth in the 5,000 meters with a time of 14 minutes, 38.68 seconds. Jason Witt of Division I Brigham Young University finished first in a meet-record time of 13:42.08 — he was the only runner in the field off...